HealthIRL: From Vision to Reality
The Journey to a connected HSE Workforce
The HealthIRL migration started out pre COVID, pre-Cyber, pre-Windows 10 as the One Programme or sometimes One UID with the purpose of creating a single digital identity for HSE staff. It was led out by a team of evangelists who had a vision of a consistent, connected workforce enabled for digitisation and cloud services. They were targeting 50,000 users across 8 domains, unpicking 30 years of legacy, challenging ways of working, potentially bringing disruption to busy staff with no immediate obvious benefit.
To say it was not easy is an underestimation, but they were resolute in their task, determined to succeed.
Overview
The programme which started out in 2017, went through a number of phases, each bringing more people across to HealthIRL with some major breakthroughs:
- June 2022 first major model 4 hospital migration in GUH.
- Late 2022 when HealthIRL became the largest domain in the HSE.
- January 2023 when HealthIRL became the default domain for the setup of all users.
- January 2024 when HealthIRL migration in the Community was materially complete.
The programme has been a major success for the HSE, putting the organisation in a unique position of having a single identity across our network. An identity which is modern, secure, cloud enabled and a foundational building block of how we deliver technology solutions across not just our statutory services but also voluntaries. It started out with a target to migrate 50,000+ users, ended up migrating 80,000+. Who knew a + could be so big? It was not an easy programme, childbirth and running marathons were analogies used, with some views that those two activities might be easier. At least they’d be over quicker.
The success of the programme was no accident, it is down to the massive talent, professionalism and resilience of the HSE Community of IT.
It owes massive thanks to a lot of people:
- The programme team(s), who despite consistent issues and challenges, continued to believe that this was the right thing to do. They collaborated, cajoled, bribed (rumour has it) and bullied people into migrations.
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HealthIRL Migration Teams – the engineers and relationship managers at the coalface, who took the brunt of any feedback, did the cajoling, encouraging and bribing on the ground and provided the tea and toast after the delivery!
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The local IT teams on the ground in the various locations, particularly in the hospitals where any change is challenging and there is no appetite for disruption given the potential patient impact. I will not mention names, but you know who you are and without you soldiering alongside us, taking the often negative feedback this programme would have gone nowhere.
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The Technology Office staff, who supported the process and created an operating model that made the transition to HealthIRL smoother for the many support teams.
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NSD who supported the team on the ground. Again, as the face of IT, often taking the brunt of issues which is never easy.
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Application support team(s) who worked tirelessly to remove any application blockers to enable migrations. This was not easy given the legacy of implementations and the lack of information/support with respect to them.
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The Steering Committee – it really must be called out that they were extremely supportive, even when we consistently missed targets, albeit always getting close. I think they probably knew we wanted them to sack us! They saw the uphill battle this was, recognised the massive effort being put in by all parties and knew the biggest critics of our delivery was ourselves and we would take any opportunity to improve. Some of them had some very good insights into how technically we could do things better. This was extremely helpful and fully taken onboard by the programme.
- Finally and most importantly to All HSE Staff, thank you for your engagement with the HealthIRL team. Your patience during this time is much appreciated – for putting up with us as we delievered this national programme.